2012 Warn On Forecast Workshop

The NOAA National Severe Storms Laboratory hosted the third annual Warn-on-Forecast Workshop February 8-9 at the National Weather Center in Norman, Okla. Warn-on-Forecast is a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research program tasked to increase tornado, severe thunderstorm, and flash flood warning lead times.

The Warn-on-Forecast workshop gives researchers an opportunity to present progress reports and to discuss plans for further research toward improvements in lead time for severe weather warnings.

Lead times are the time between a warning and when weather actually strikes. Trends in yearly-averaged tornado warning lead time suggest the present weather warning process, largely based upon a warn-on-detection approach using National Weather Service Doppler radars, is reaching a plateau and further increases in lead time will be difficult to obtain. A new approach is needed. Warn-on-Forecast is a convective-scale probabilistic hazardous weather forecast system. Guidance is provided by an ensemble of forecasts from numerical weather prediction models. Further research is needed to develop this system.

Warn-on-Forecast collaborators include NOAA National Severe Storms Laboratory and Earth System Research Laboratory, NOAA National Weather Service and Storm Prediction Center, The University of Oklahoma’s Center for the Analysis and Prediction of Storms, and Social Science Woven Into Meteorology.